The best films of 2012

This has been a weird year, movie-wise, for a number of reasons. Reason number one, of course, is that I live in France, and not in America, where the past couple months have seen the release of more prestige movies than the rest of the year combined. No such luck here: December brought Life of Pi and The Hobbit (and Beasts of the Southern Wild, a good six months after its American release), but Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, Cloud Atlas, The Master, and even Silver Linings Playbook will have to wait for 2013 (meanwhile, Richard Linklater’s Bernie may never be released here). That’s the way distribution’s always worked, but this year it seems that more “big” movies didn’t make it here in time for Christmas—or it might be that there were more such movies to begin with.

Another, more personal reason is that I simply didn’t care all that much for most of the “big” movies we did get (including most of the Cannes lineup). I profoundly disliked Amour (to be honest, I’ve always been ambivalent, at best, towards Haneke), had huge issues with Life of Pi and Beyond the Hills, and was largely disappointed by Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film I’d been waiting for since Sundance and which turned out to be, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky so rightly put it, bullshit. Even Holy Motors, acclaimed by critics everywhere, failed to entirely convince me, despite having some of my favorite cinematic moments of the year (including the intermission, which would probably top my list).

Yet in spite of all that, 2012 was still a very good year for film, thanks to a baffling number of strong genre efforts. In fact, 2012 may have been the best year for genre cinema in quite some time—the past two years were very top-heavy, with brilliant movies like Attack the Block, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or Let Me In, while this year just had so many great genre films. That, to me, more than makes up for the (relative) lack of great prestige movie, and for having to wait until January to see Jessica Chastain kicking ass and Joaquin Phoenix running around like a lunatic.

My top 10 for the year actually has 12 movies on it, because I couldn’t get myself to cut two of them, and the whole exercise is completely arbitrary anyway. The rules are the same as last year, and the year before last: any movie released for the first time in France in 2012 is eligible, except for films that were released internationally in 2011 (if you want to see what my list would look like were those films included as well, just head over to the French version of this blog (my top of 2012 list should be up tomorrow, with any luck). As usual, this is of course highly subjective, and if you disagree with my picks, you’re probably wrong. Unlike the last two years, when Breathless and A Separation respectively topped my list, 2012 didn’t have one film I felt was head and shoulders above the rest (or rather, there was one, but it was one of those 2011 holdovers), and at least all the films in my top 3 could have ended up in first place (and probably would if you asked me on any other day).

10. Robot & Frank/The Deep Blue Sea/The Grey

In Jake Schreier’s Robot & Frank, Frank Langella struggles with old age; in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, Rachel Weisz struggles with the disappointments of life, which never turns out the way we thought it would; and in Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, Liam Neeson struggles with his own mortality and with the loss of his wife (a case of reality turning an unsurprising plot development into quite the emotional sucker punch).

Despite their differences in terms of genre and approach (one’s a science fiction film about a retired crook and a robot teaming up, another one’s a survival movie in which Liam Neeson doesn’t quite get to punch wolves in the face), all three films turn out to be unexpectedly layered and heartbreaking, thanks in large part to great performances by their lead actors and, in The Deep Blue Sea’s case, by their supporting cast as well. If you’re feeling too high on life, try watching all three right after the other, it should bring you right back down to earth.

Here’s the thing: I’m usually no Steven Soderbergh fan. I tend to dislike his ensemble pieces immensely (I hated both Traffic and Contagion, and the Ocean’s movies range from mildly annoying to unwatchable), and to like his smaller efforts only marginally better (that being said, Out of Sight’s really good). But here’s the other thing: I really, really loved the two movies he put out this year. Magic Mike was smart and fun and OMG Channing Tatum’s abs, but Haywire was just a great action movie, period (and it also had Channing Tatum, natch). Gina Carano makes for a much more convincing action heroine than pretty much any other actress, the action scenes are brutal and beautiful and shot in a way that actually makes sense, and the script has a ton of fun with meta commentary about the way action films treat women. Simple, elegant, and tough.

8. The Raid: Redemption

Speaking of action, Gareth Evans’s The Raid: Redemption (what a dumb subtitle, really) was the adrenaline rush of the year, a relentless onslaught of violence punctuated by the occasional moment of visual poetry. It doesn’t get much simpler than “a bunch of cops are trapped in a building and must fight their way out,” but Evans milks that set-up for all it’s got, staging brutal set piece after brutal set piece, culminating in a two-on-one fight that keeps going for much longer than it has any right to, yet never feels too long. The Raid: Redemption is the kind of film you come out of physically exhausted, as if it was you who’d been getting your ass kicked for two hours.

7. ParaNorman

Brave, Wreck-It Ralph, and even Rise of the Guardians were all good animation films, but Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s ParaNorman was by far the best of the bunch. It starts off as a sort of comedic twist on The Sixth Sense, then turns into a PG zombie movie, before going into some genuinely dark and scary places. Like another film a little further down this list, it also has a lot of fun with archetypes and horror tropes. The best thing about ParaNorman, though, is its awesome (as in awe-inspiring) climax, an astonishing sequence of visual bravura that plays out like the most thrilling video game boss fight while keeping the emotional stakes as high as they can be.

6. Paris by Night

Philippe Lefebvre’s Paris by Night is an old-fashioned noir, reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville’s films, and particularly Un Flic (the film’s original title, Une Nuit, even seems to be a deliberate Melville homage). For one night, we follow Roschdy Zem, as the commander of the Paris vice unit, as he visits bars, restaurants, and nightclubs, and tries to remain a step ahead of internal affairs and of the crooks that are trying to set him up. This is a moody and surprisingly complex film, and Zem, who seems to play nothing but cops and gangsters these days, delivers a great performance as a man who knows he’s doing the wrong thing but can’t find a way to do the right one. Not a single shot is fired in Paris by Night, but there’s more tension than in almost any other film that came out this year.

5. The Cabin in the Woods

In terms of pure fun, nothing this year beat Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods. Co-written with Joss Whedon, this is a marvel of a meta horror movie and a hilarious puzzle, full of twists and turns on top of more twists, and even more turns. I don’t like using the word “clever” to describe a movie, as it often implies shallowness, but The Cabin in the Woods is one hell of a clever film. And, yes, there’s no particular profundity to it. It is what it is, but what it is is a ton of fun, and one of the tightest screenplays this side of last year’s Attack the Block. Plus, you gotta love the way Goddard embraces the mayhem of the third act (one word: unicorn).

4. Oslo, August 31

From the year’s most fun movie to the most devastating. Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31 is a merciless character study, following 34-year-old Anders, a former drug addict who just got out of rehab. Anders (another one of the year’s great performance, by Anders Danielsen Lie) wanders around Oslo, a city he used to know so well, bumping into old friends turned strangers, trying to find a reason to go on living when the world seems to have passed him by entirely. In one of the best scenes of the year, Anders sits in a coffee house and listens to people, imagining what their lives must be like. No one seems able to show Anders the same empathy and compassion. “It’ll get better. It’ll all work out,” he tells his friend Thomas. Then his smile freezes. “Except it won’t, you know.”

3. Moonrise Kingdom

Perhaps my favorite Wes Anderson movie since Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom focuses, as usual, on an assorted group of outcasts and sad sacks, from Edward Norton’s inept scout master to Bruce Willis’s sad (but not dumb) police captain. It’s the kids that steal the show, though, and Anderson perfectly captures the awkwardness of adolescence with Sam and Suzy’s clumsy attempts at replicating adult courtship, followed by a no less clumsy moment of sexual awakening. The external world, so often a threat in Anderson’s films, is eventually integrated into the kids’ world rather than the other way around, and even Tilda Swinton’s inflexible social services agent (brilliantly named just “Social Services”) eventually softens up, making Moonrise Kingdom the most open of all of Anderson’s films.

2. Looper

Okay, so maybe Looper, and not The Cabin in the Woods, was the most fun you could have at the movies this year. Rian Johnson’s third feature (and second starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the perfect remedy to all those mindless science fiction blockbusters, a big-budget action movie with a brain—and one hell of a big heart. Like the best time travel movies, Looper isn’t so much about time travel itself as about its moral implications, about free will and determinism (“So I changed it” has got to be one of my favorite lines of the year). It’s the kind of movie I wish I could see for the first time every time, except it’s too much fun to see just how everything fits together.

1. Cosmopolis

If ever there was a movie for the 99%, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel is it. A brutal critique of capitalism run wild, Cosmopolis is set almost entirely in a limo drifting through a Tonronto barely disguised to look like New York going through the apocalypse. Everything in the movie happens on the edges of the screen, because its hero, golden boy Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), is too bored and self-obsessed to pay attention to the world that’s coming crashing down around him—even as he’s about to come crashing down with it. The esoteric dialogue (“I don’t understand that,” Samantha Morton’s character keeps repeating in her one scene) and somewhat slow pace make it a tough sell, but Cosmopolis is nothing short of phenomenal, and once again proves that Cronenberg is one of the very best directors working today.

Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order: Anna Karenina, Argo, The Avengers, The Day He Arrives, Holy Motors, Keep the Lights On,Killer Joe,Laurence Anyways,Premium Rush, Magic Mike, Skyfall,The We and the I.

Once again, none of the movies on your list are on mine, mostly because I didn’t see any of the movies on your list (except for Moonrise Kingdom, which was charming). :-) Of your honorable mentions, I wasn’t blown away by Anna Karenina, but I didn’t hate it, either. The Avengers was good popcorn fare (and one of the most fun movies out this year), while Argo and Skyfall rate much higher on my list (as in, they are on my list). Speaking of my list, I’m still waiting to see Django Unchained and Les Miserables before I post it.